Even In Nightmares, Cbs Only A Network

April 23, 1985|By Noel Holston, Sentinel Television Critic

Keep telling yourself, it's only a network.

Ted Turner is not trying to buy the Roman Catholic Church and auction off the statuary. He is not trying to buy the American Red Cross so as to corner the world market in gauze. He is not trying to take over Walt Disney Productions and put Mickey Mouse on the market as a laboratory animal.

The Atlanta sports and cable TV tycoon is trying to buy CBS, a television network, and to make some changes in its programming if he succeeds.

Now, admittedly, a television network is a powerful corporate entity. Certainly, television networks' programming -- fictional, non-fictional and the confusingly amalgamated -- and commercials influence how we spend our money, what we talk about and what we think. And because CBS is the most popular network, all ''dayparts'' considered, it's probably the most influential.

Still, it's only a network. Its ''power'' is derived entirely from its ability -- always contingent, never a given -- to please a lot of the people a lot of the time. If CBS were radically altered tomorrow, it would shake up some people's routine, but it wouldn't be the end of the world.

Let's imagine the most radical possible scenario:

Turner's hostile takeover attempt succeeds; he is in fact in league with North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms and other folks so right-wing they make President Ronald Reagan look like Bella Abzug; and they waste no time cleansing CBS' entertainment programming of its permissive elements and CBS' news division of its traitorously liberal reporters, producers and editors.

They cancel CBS' entire Monday night lineup -- Scarecrow & Mrs. King, Kate & Allie and Cagney & Lacey because they're seen as a feminist conspiracy, and Newhart because of the company it keeps. Big deal. They dump Dallas, Knots Landing and Falcon Crest for glorifying promiscuity and giving businessmen a bad name, and Magnum, P.I., Simon & Simon, Airwolf, Cover Up and Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer for being violent. So what?

Fans of most of these shows would have no reason to panic. ABC and NBC, not to mention product-hungry independent stations, would fall all over themselves picking up the hits from among those outcasts. Struggling ABC might even offer to take the whole bunch off Turner's hands.

Turner could augment what's left of CBS' schedule -- The Jeffersons, Murder, She Wrote, Crazy Like a Fox -- with Braves baseball games, reruns of Superstation WTBS' Portrait of America and World of Audubon series and selected old movies, mainly Westerns, until Atlanta's creative community had time to develop some pro-family, pro-American series. If they eventually prove popular, so much the better.

Over at CBS News, Turner, at Jesse Helms' request, replaces Dan Rather and Bill Moyers with Paul Harvey and James Kilpatrick. No cause for alarm.

CBS News' entire staff would probably quit in protest -- and quickly be hired by ABC News, NBC News and assorted major-market TV stations. Not only would these news operations be strengthened in terms of journalistic experience and technical acumen, America would have a distinctly conservative news-gathering operation for the first time.

Of course, very few national network-quality producers and reporters would be judged conservative enough to work at the new CBS News, but running the operation with a staff of 17 would help Turner keeps costs down.